Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 18:20:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Siddharth Chatterjee <siddhart-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: Re: M-G: "Ozone hole"



Rolf,

I only have time now for a quick reponse. Regarding your main points,
I will have to do some more research on the hard evidence and get back
to you after some time. But here is a brief reply.


On Mon, 16 Dec 1996, Rolf Martens wrote:

> ....
>
> Now I have checked out this matter at least a little,
> by glancing one more time into the book that has
> been a main source for me on the "ozone hole"
> question and which I shall quote some lines from
> here. I'm interested in seing whether you have data
> that refute what it's saying on this point, Siddharth.
>
> The book in question is by Rogelio A. Maduro and Ralf
> Schauerhammer: "The Holes in the Ozone Scare -
> The Scientific Evidence That the Sky Isn't Falling",
> 21st Century Associates (one of the bourgeois LaRouche
> group's publishers), Washington, D.C., 1992, ISBN
> 0-9628134-0-0, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
> 92-64062.

Below is some of FAIR's response to rightwing talk show host Rush
Limbaugh who makes the same claims as you do. Note the reference to
the Lyndon LaRouche book that you cited.

______________________________________________________________________
FAIR' s RESPONSE to the right-wing Rush Limbaugh about Ozone Hole


 Response to FAIR's original compilation of (a few of) Rush
 Limbaugh's inaccuracies was so great that FAIR has expanded the
 report and publish it in book form as The Way Things Aren't: Rush
 Limbaugh's Reign of Error. Get it at your local bookstore (ISBN:
 1-56584-260-X) or order it from FAIR for $6.95 plus $1.50 shipping
 and handling. (Two or more books, $7 each, including postage; ten
 books, $50.) You can call 800-847-3993 and use your MasterCard or
 Visa, or send your check or money order to

      FAIR
      Dept V6-CNL
      PO Box 170
      Congers, NY 10920

 Or, get a free copy of the book when you subscribe to EXTRA!, the
 magazine of FAIR. A one-year subscription is only $19; use the
 address or phone number above.

 Outline of this report:

    * The way things aren't: Rush Limbaugh debates reality
         o A mountain of distortion
         o Unchallenged demagoguery
    * Limbaugh vs. reality
         o Bogus economics
         o Weird science
         o Brotherhood...and sisterhood
         o The Clinton obsession
         o Fractured history
         o Personal attacks
         o Limbaugh vs. Limbaugh
         o Rush Limbaugh: champion of the overdog
         o Koppel covers for Limbaugh's rumor-mongering

 The way things aren't: Rush Limbaugh debates reality

 EXTRA! (July/August 1994)

      "I do not lie on this program. And I do not make things up
      for the advancement of my cause. And if I find that I have
      been mistaken or am in error then I proclaim it generally
      at the top of--beginning of--a program or as loudly as I
      can."
      --Rush Limbaugh, (Radio show, 8/30/93)

      "Most of us here in the media are what I consider
      infotainers.... Rush Limbaugh is what I call a
      disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation."
      --Al Franken at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
      (4/23/94)

 Rush Limbaugh has gotten a lot of mileage out of his claim that
 volcanoes do more harm to the ozone layer than human-produced
 chemicals. He featured it in his best-selling book, The Way Things
 Ought to Be (paperback edition pp. 155-157): "Mount Pinatubo in the
 Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of
 ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons
 manufactured by wicked, diabolical and insensitive corporations in
 history.... Mankind can't possibly equal the output of even one
 eruption from Pinatubo, much less 4 billion years' worth of them, so
 how can we destroy ozone?" Limbaugh calls concern about the ozone
 layer: "balderdash. Poppycock." The only people who worry about it
 are "environmental wackos," "dunderheaded alarmists and prophets of
 doom."

 Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell (New York Post, 1/14/94) used the
 volcano theory as Exhibit A to illustrate Limbaugh's "very
 well-informed and savvy understanding of the political issues of our
 time." "While far more pretentious people have been joining the
 chorus of hysteria over 'global warming,'" Sowell wrote, "Limbaugh
 pointed out in his [first] book that one of the high readings of
 greenhouse gases in the atmosphere came right after a volcanic
 eruption--and volcanoes can put more gases into the atmosphere than
 the entire human race." The alert reader will notice that Sowell has
 mixed up global warming and the ozone layer, two different problems.
 Still, Sowell concluded of Limbaugh, "It is obvious that the man has
 done his homework--and done it well."

 Ted Koppel must have thought so, too, when he invited Limbaugh to be
 on Nightline (2/4/92) as an environmental "expert," opposite
 then-Sen. Al Gore. "If you listen to what Senator Gore said,"
 Limbaugh proclaimed, "it is man-made products which are causing the
 ozone depletion, yet Mount Pinatubo has put 570 times the amount of
 chlorine into the atmosphere in one eruption than all of man-made
 chlorofluorocarbons in one year."

 On his radio show, his syndicated TV show, and in two best-selling
 books, Limbaugh has advanced the idea that volcanoes are the real
 ozone culprits. This theory, like so many of Limbaugh's claims, has
 only one problem: Limbaugh doesn't know what he's talking about.

 A mountain of distortion

 "Chlorine from natural sources is soluble, and so it gets rained out
 of the lower atmosphere," the journal Science explained (6/11/93).
 "CFCs, in contrast, are insoluble and inert and thus make it to the
 stratosphere to release their chlorine."

 Science also noted that chlorine found in the stratosphere--where it
 can eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer--is always found with
 other byproducts of CFCs, and not with the byproducts of natural
 chlorine sources.

 "Ozone depletion is real, as certain as Neil Armstrong's landing on
 the moon," Dr. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the
 University of California at Irvine, told EXTRA!. "Natural causes of
 ozone depletion are not significant."

 But Limbaugh didn't rely on atmospheric scientists for his
 information about the ozone layer--he dismissed them as the
 "agenda-oriented scientific community." Instead, he turned to Dixy
 Lee Ray, a former Washington State governor and Atomic Energy
 Commission chair, who wrote Trashing the Planet--"the most
 footnoted, documented book I have ever read," Limbaugh says.

 If you check Ray's footnotes, you'll find that the main source for
 the volcano theory is Rogelio Maduro, the associate editor of 21st
 Century Science & Technology, a magazine published by the Lyndon
 LaRouche network. Maduro is evidently not part of the
 "agenda-oriented scientific community"--even though he does have a
 bachelor's degree in geology.

 The volcano theorists can't even keep their stories straight. In his
 book, Limbaugh claims that the 1991 Pinatubo eruption put 1000 times
 as much chlorine into the atmosphere as industry has ever produced
 through CFCs; yet on Nightline, Pinatubo is alleged to have produced
 570 times the equivalent of one year's worth of CFCs. Both can't be
 right. It turns out neither are.

 The figure 570 apparently derives from Ray's book--but she said it
 was Mount Augustine, an Alaskan volcano that erupted in 1976, that
 put out 570 times as much chlorine as one year's worth of CFCs.
 Ray's source is a 1980 Science magazine article--but that piece was
 actually talking about the chlorine produced by a gigantic eruption
 that occurred 700,000 years ago in California (Science, 6/11/93).

 Unchallenged demagoguery

 This kind of sloppiness, ignorance and/or fabrication is run of the
 mill in Limbaugh's commentary, both broadcast and print. From dioxin
 to Whitewater, from Rodney King to Reaganomics, Rush Limbaugh has a
 finely honed ability to twist and distort reality.

_______________________________________________________________________
Rolf continues

>
> Here, I shall quote at some length what it's saying
> on natural sources of chlorine, including the
> question Siddharth brought up, that of whether or not
> such chlorine reaches the stratosphere (that part
> of the atmosphere which extends from the troposphere
> to the ionosphere, from the hight of 12 km to that of
> 80 km, my dictionary says - and that's where the ozone
> layer is too).
>
> Hoping that this may interest others too, I shall
> quote the entire first sub-chapter, and some lines
> of the second, of chapter 1 (some two A5 pages), of
> that book, making brief comments in square brakets on
> those points where the particular matter of natural
> chlorine in the stratosphere is touched on; I shall
> number them "Strato-Cl POINT so-and so"):
>
> "1. NATURAL SOURCES OF CHLORINE ARE MUCH GREATER
> THAN CFC:S"
>
> "The ozone depletion theory does not claim that CFCs
> deplete ozone; it claims that a chlorine atom released
> by the breakdown of CFCs depletes the ozone layer. If
> it were true that chlorine from CFCs could wipe out the
> ozone layer, then Mother Nature would appear to be
> suicidal. Chlorine is one of the most naturally
> abundant trace chemicals in the atmosphere."
>
> "The natural sources of chlorine dwarf the tiny amounts
> of chlorine that could possibly be released by all the
> CFCs on Earth. Based on the evidence, in fact, if
> chlorine is truly a threat to the oxone layer, then the
> government should cap volcanoes and prohibit seawater
> from evaporating."
>
> "The yearly production of CFCs today is estimated at
> approximately 1.1 million tons, which includes
> approximately 750,000 tons of chlorine. Compare this
> to the natural sources, as shown in Table 1.1 and
> Figure 1.1." [The latter I cannot show, but here's
> the book's Table 1.1:]
>
> "Atmospheric Sources of Clorine
> (millions of tons per year)
>
> Seawater=09=09=09600.0
> Volcanoes=09=09 =09 36.0
> Biomass burning=09=09  =09  8.4
> Ocean biota=09=09  =09  5.0
>
> *Total natural sources*=09 =09649.0
>
> Chlorine in CFCs=09=09  0.75
> Chlorine theoretically
> released by the alleged
> breakup of CFCs                   0.0075"
>
> "=A4 More than 600 million tons of chlorine are released
> into the atmosphere every year by the evaporation of
> seawater, which contains salt (sodium chloride, NaCl).
> Although most of this chlorine is washed out by
> precipitation, large amounts of it still reach the
> stratoshpere, through the pumping action of thunder-
> storms, hurricanes, typhoons, and other cyclonic
> activity."

In what form is 600 million tons of chlorine released by sea water
to the atmosphere? This sounds like a fabrication to me. If this huge
amount of chlorine in its natural state was released by sea, then there
would be no need to manufacture chlorine (a highly used industrial gas)
by say the chlor-alkali process. All one would need to
do would be to devise a method for skimming this chlorine from the
atmosphere. This is not current practice.

If the claim is made that 600 million tons of sodium chloride (NaCl) is
emitted by the oceans in the form of particulate matter, then the
situation is completely different. The Na and Cl atoms in salt are
held together by extremely powerful electrostatic forces (called
ionic bonds) so that even high temperatures would be unable to break
the NaCl molecule into its constituent elements. Thus even if some
particulate NaCl (there would have to be in the size range of less than
1-10 microns since pareticles larger than this size would have been
washed or settled out), they would remain as salt since the
incoming solar radiation would be too weak to dissociate them.

This is all the time I have for now. Once again I urge you to seek
evidence/non-evidence from genuine scientific sources rather than
tall claims made by the mad La Rouchites.

Sid  




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